I figured we could all use a laugh on this dark Wednesday, so I’ll report on my Tuesday morning reading pleasure. Leave it to Stuart Jeffries from The Guardian to write about race and class issues in ways that were as likely true decades back and alas, will be for decades into the future. In the music/opera review section, no less.

This is a tale of two cities. In Birmingham, a screening of Blue Story, a gritty depiction of a fond boyhood friendship between two young black British men tragically sundered by gang-related postcode wars, sparked a mass brawl in the cinema foyer, unacceptably making girls queuing for a singalong to Frozen 2 run away in fear.

Unacceptable! Gaggles of tweens scattered on the streets of Birmingham.They might even drop their iPhones…

In London in October last year, a production of Siegfried, an opera about a tooled-up psychopath, similarly provoked fisticuffs. But which one got withdrawn from view? Was it Rapman’s directorial debut about Britain in crisis with a grime soundtrack for an audience of ordinary millennials and Gen Zedsters, or the Victorian opera promoting knife crime set in a ludicrous fairyland by an antisemitic megalomaniac, and served up for a demographic of hedge fund lawyers and couturiers to the royal family? Oh, have a guess. 

Ludicrous fairyland by an antisemitic megalomaniac: a summary of Wagner in 6 words. Nothing else needs ever be said again.

It’s not far down the motorway from the Star City multiplex in Nechells to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, but in social terms there is an unbridgeable chasm between the two. It’s one rule for ordinary Britons and another for opera-going stiffs. Such is the madness of broken Britain in 2019.

Why confine it to 2019? Or, for that matter, Britain?

Oh come off it, you say. Wagner’s Siegfried, the third in his 15-hour cycle Der Ring des Niebelungen, isn’t about knife crime. You can’t use that to explain why Oxford-educated Matthew Feargrieve, 43, was convicted earlier this week for punching Düsseldorf-born fashion designer Ulrich Engler, 56, during a performance. City of London magistrates heard that Feargrieve had taken exception to Engler climbing into the front row and into a seat occupied by his partner Catherine Chandler’s tweed coat. Engler told the court he placed the coat in Ms Chandler’s lap after ascertaining she had not paid for the seat, while Feargrieve said that the couturier hurled the garment to the floor. Unless it was a particularly horrible coat, that sounds out of character for Engler, whose motto on his website is “Elegance is unchanging and timeless” and who has designed dresses for the Countess of Derby. But the fact is that Siegfried does promote knife crime. It opens with a character called Mime forging a sword at an anvil in his underground lair, to make it sharp enough for the eponymous hero to slay a dragon and steal its golden hoard. Later in Act One, Siegfried actually sings a song to his sword, namely Notung! Notung! Neidliches Schwert! (What kind of freak names his sword? That’s right: a Wagnerian one.)

OK, I take it back. More to be said about Wagner.

According to Engler’s testimony, when he was assaulted the conductor had already begun and the opera was about 10 minutes into its six-hour running time. No one in court, not even the beguilingly named Judge Zani, thought to listen to their Karajan recording of Siegfried to get a sense of the mood in the posh seats that afternoon. But I have. And the music is so febrile from the get-go, with Mime beating out a metallic tattoo at about 120 beats per minute, that it astounds me that the brawl only embroiled two people. Everybody’s nerves must have been a-jangle even before Siegfried entered like a proto-football hooligan with his demented preverbal chant: “Hoiho! Hoiho! Hau ’ein! Hau ’ein!”

“I had never seen someone looking with so much anger and terror at me,” Engler said of the attack. “While Mr Feargrieve was hitting me, he said: ‘How dare you talk to my wife like this?’ The only three things I said to this woman was, would you mind if I sat next to you again, have you paid for the seat, and that I was sorry.” Another case of Wagner-related madness? If so, it’s amazing the courts aren’t teeming with them.

Probably because most Britons take Oxford-educated stiff’s right to defend their (and their coats’) privileges as a birth right……

I’m not trying to exonerate Mr Feargrieve for the crime for which he was convicted on Monday and will be sentenced in January. Indeed, if the testimony of former physiotherapist Elaine McMaster, who was in the Covent Garden audience that afternoon is right – namely that Feargrieve and Chandler were swaying side to side to the music, and that Chandler was flicking her hair and being noisy – then hanging is too good for them. “People don’t behave like that in their local cinema, let alone in the Royal OperaHouse,” McMaster said sensibly.

What I am saying is that Covent Garden should immediately commission an opera called The Coat about the night in question, to explore how classical music rather than video games causes mindless violence. Possibly with a score by Harrison Birtwistle so unlistenable you’d climb over your own granny to get out of the auditorium.

Note to self: spare YDP readers any exposure to Harrison Birtwistle’s music in the future….

That said, what’s important to note is that fights at the opera are wrong, not least because they encourage headline writers to reference old Marx brothers movies they’ve probably never seen. As Roger Scruton argues in the The Ring of Truth: The Wisdom of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung, the takeaway from those many hours of Wagner is that, in the bleak Viking world of the Ring, despite its cast of crazily violent hammer-throwing and skull-smashing gods, is the reality of love and compassion made manifest by Brünnhilde’s sacrifice to her nutty spouse, Siegfried.

Strangely, that is very similar to the message of Blue Story, though the machete-wielding toughs who injured police officers at Star City and terrified the Frozen 2 demographic clearly failed to appreciate it. Blue Story’s writer and director Andrew Onwubolu, AKA Rapman, said his film is “about love, not violence”, adding: “I pray that we can all learn to live with love and treat each other with tolerance and respect.” That message can be taken in more cheaply at screenings of Blue Story than at the opera – and, despite last month’s controversy, the film can, and indeed must, still be seen.

Agreed. Here is the trailer. Frightening in its depiction of the reality of contemporary life as a poor Black man in Britain. And as distant from the Frozen 2 demographic’s reality as presumably your’s and mine. All the more reason to get informed.

Rapman makes an excellent point. This is, after all, the season of goodwill to all men. But not necessarily to small girls. In fact, the message I take from this tale of two cities is that it’s not Blue Story or Siegfried that should be banned, but Frozen 2. Surely that is something that most of us in broken Britain can get behind. As Boris Johnson so wisely said after last week’s general election, it is time to let the healing begin.

Can we PLEASE have more opera reviews like this one?

*

Music today, in my continued attempts to separate my take on the product from my take on the producer, is, of course, a duet from Wagner’s Siegfried. Bruenhilde tells Siegfried of her eternal love and the fact that he can’t act on it without endangering his being a “hero.” Recorded in 1949 – when people still knew how to behave at the opera…..

If the above review did NOT make you laugh, then this German cheat sheet on the whole of the Ring cycle won’t make you either. As they say in this family of mine – Heuer humor, but maybe it’s not Heuer’s after all, but Germans – with – a – penchant – for – opera humor. And besides I would not have survived “Hausmusik” as a teen if not for strange jokes …(and no, I no longer play the cello.)

Photographs from last Friday’s walk along the Willamette river on a windless day, with the structure a possible stand-in for Mime’s smithy (the guy who fostered Siegfried, forever casting stereotypes of evil dwarfs.)